"For years the white working-class have had their lives lampooned and been smeared with a multitude of ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ by politicians and journalists who, simultaneously, champion open borders because they believe Europe owes it to the third world. They don’t understand that the misery and poverty they think exists only in Africa and the Middle East is also found closer to home. The victims of globalization are everywhere.
What France (and the rest of Europe) is witnessing is not a populist revolt but a politically incorrect one. People have had enough of being mocked and marginalized by what George Orwell described as ‘a dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat."
It is not, I would suggest, a time for someone recently diagnosed with a "pathological" pulse rate to be involved in politics, least of all one who is about to be tested for the narrowing of the arteries having been taken to hospital in an ambulance with a suspected heart attack. Or for said person to have to explain to deaf ears about the intractable nature of the endless 'yes/no' of sophist politics. You will have to fight it out among yourselves, making sure that you shout louder than your enemies, And rest assured that you will have enemies all around. That's the way it is with the "conflict pluralism" of competing goods. There is no "good" to settle competing claims. Only power relations. And these tend to be unequal. Neutrality is just another word for liberalism, and liberalism is just an ideological mask for the anarchy of the rich and powerful. I don't do shouting. I've been warning long enough as to how liberalism, with its prideful self-assertion of taking "morality into our own hands", with individuals and groups defining the good as they see fit, will one day turn mutual self-cancellation into a mutual self-annihilation. It is the end of the public realm, the systematic disabling of politics in face of an external negation of all notions of "the good." Well here we are.
"Don't you want to fight?" I was once asked in exasperated tones by a class warrior from the Socialist Workers Party. Well, no. The trouble with the fight mode is that those who get into it never know when to stop and become incapable of coming out of it. They see enemies everywhere. And they quickly find them among their own.
But I have been fighting against the globalization of economic and social relations under a liberal trade order my entire life. I've been accused of being a "globalist" for my trouble! My fight was conducted in favour of a global civil society, a genuine globalization that is firmly rooted in a healthy localization. The Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, and other left of centre parties around the world, instead shoved their liberal agenda down our throats, and middle class liberals, conceiving themselves left on account of voting against Republicans and Conservatives, didn't give a damn about the working class who lost out.
So the red scarves will fight it out with the yellow vests?
The red scarves are the techies and engineers, the middle class, the yellow vests the workers ... In Britain, we had three successive Labour governments who governed for "the aspiring classes." It meant forcing globalization down our throats, to hell with the consequences, and to hell with the victims, garnering enough votes from the comfortable to ensure re-election. The so called left of centre has divided and demoralized its own constituency, has set its face against radical social transformation, delivered a half-arsed liberal tinkering that has cost fortunes and made problems worse to invite yet further neoliberalism. Such a politics renders the public realm unviable and unaffordable. And that, whether "big government" or "free markets", is liberalism, it is most certainly not socialism.
Note well this passage from the article:
"Both sides must respect one another, particularly the red scarves, who perhaps should refrain from displaying any more provocative posters. France has been brought to the brink of insurrection by the sneering contempt shown by the minority towards the majority. The former are mainly middle-class metropolitans, whose ascent to power began in 1968, and who in the decades since have relentlessly lectured and hectored their compatriots."
I have warned and warned and warned, to a point detrimental to my physical and mental health, against such hectoring and lecturing coming from 'enlightened' liberals, most recently in a final, and failed, attempt to induce greens and environmentalists to engage with people as citizens. I was either ignored as an irrelevance or treated with contempt. Just tell people "we're doomed" was one way my attempt to engage the people rather than instruct them was parodied. And that by a green friend.
It all got me nowhere, other than hospital with a heart condition and, if carried on any further, will put me in an early grave.
Beware of an environmental politics that reduces to taxation and regulation – it won't be popular and it won't work either. That's the danger of pressing science (and technology) into service as ethics and politics. It's a value-neutral anti-politics that fails to build the political will, motivation and consent for effective environmental action. Such a politics amounts to an environmental austerity designed to preserve not the planetary ecology but the capital system degrading and destroying that ecology. I have no time for Macron, and less time for Trump and his claim that the yellow vests protests are a revolt on the part of the people against the Paris agreement, government and high taxation. The architects of and apologists for the capital system are responsible for this crisis of legitimacy and politics. An increased tax burden is being foisted in people who have been made to carry the burden for the financial and banking scam of recent years, and the governing elites in business and politics are clearly attempting to appropriate the climate cause to ensure further passive compliance with the capital system. Revolt or die, but ensure that you have an effective political end-game, and material counter-organisations able to scale up to the challenge whilst commanding continuous popular assent. Reject politics and government, and you will assuredly end up prisoners of money and power. To transcend the choice between a neoliberal elitism and reactionary populism - positions which both serve to entrench and extend the capital relation - there is a need for politics. I am not merely leery but positively fearful of an insurgent politics that rejects politics. It's easy enough to advance demands, ideals and wishes - forging them into viable institutional forms and policy frameworks, with the active support of a mass constituency, is something else entirely. Beware the reaction of dashed expectations.
I'll repeat for the umpteenth, and hopefully the last, time my view - we have lived through an era in which economic liberals on the right and cultural liberals on the left have been engaged in a phony war with each other, with the public having to choose between a phony right and a phony left, with both serving as two cheeks of the same liberal backside. "Two bad situations which tried to offset each other." (Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris Bk IX ch 2). Free markets and free trade in economics, destabilizing economies and unraveling the planetary ecology, and ethical and cultural relativism undermining social cohesion and communal identity, have proceeded hand-in-hand, so that in the end there is nothing to do but fight it out and shout over against each other.
Power will decide that one, as in all sophist politics.
I am most emphatically NOT a sophist.
Stop pressing revolutionary demands through a liberal politics and ethics. Not only does it not work, and will not work, it invites a reactionary backlash.
And don't succumb to the totalitarian temptation if you do indeed seek to transcend liberalism - don't led your lust for power blind you to other voices. How ironic it would be if, after a lifetime arguing for socialism, I should end up being sent to the gulags by erstwhile friends. It's happened before.
Ponder long and hard Gramsci's description of Fascism as the vicious counter-revolution to the revolution that never came.
Liberalism is a busted flush, with its neutral public sphere and competing visions of "the good." It's called pluralism. I call it demoralization - and it positively invites a shouting match between the deaf. With worse to come. People can't bear chaos for too long. Incommensurate values is all I will say. I've said and written enough over the years on this to wreck my health and put me in an early grave.
Be cautious of a populist revolt from the left against Trump-style misappropriations and misdirections of (legitimate and overdue) working class anger at injustice. That anger and activity has to be effectively canalized.
“Something has kept me away from the movement of the Gilets Jaunes: it is the overwhelming presence, the constant return of the cheerless tricolore flag,..” Alain Badiou.
"The Gilets Jaunes fight the Bourgeoisie”, as Marx would say. That is true. But they do it to restore an old and outdated order, and not to invent a new social and political order, whose names have been, since the nineteenth century, “socialism” or, especially, “communism”."
For starters, the first book I ever wrote, where I labour the point concerning the need for appropriate socio-political organs in scaling action to appropriate and effective levels:
Good chapter on French Revolutionary Syndicalism. Sympathetic, but critical. Political and institutional failures here led people into the embrace of Communist parties, sending socialism to a totalitarian prison for the best part of the twentieth century. A waste of time, talent, and energy, entrenching liberalism and the loss of the public realm and the politics of the good.
Frankly, rubbish, tedious, to boot, and not worth my time. I'm not one of the 'dreary tribe.'
All things have to be ordered to their true ends.
That's a one lesson line for free traders and those who would contest them in the name of the people.
Other than that, I'm tired out and deserve a long rest.
I have been given yet another second chance, with medical exams to come, and I'm taking it.
I am frankly exhausted, barely crawling out of bed at 11am, and am still tired out the rest of the day. The world will have to get along without me, I see little evidence it is listening anyway. No wonder friends are taking "The Benedict Option" in one form or another. That won't work, either. Whatever corruption in the political or social order you are trying to escape, it will catch you up.
I intend to stick around. I've said enough over the years. The world can catch me up.